UDDIe: an extended registry for Web services

The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is a specification for distributed Web-based information registries for Web Services. UDDI allows HTTP-enabled business services to be published, and subsequently searched, based on their interface. UDDI consists of three components: "white pages" to hold basic contact information and identifiers for a company, "yellow pages" to enable companies to be listed based on their industry categories (using standard taxonomies), and "green pages" to record interface details of how a Web service is to be invoked. UDDI is however limited in scope - allowing white, yellow or green pages to be searched based on a few attributes, and does not provide an automatic mechanism for updating the registry as services (and service providers) change. We implement UDDIe -an extension to UDDI, which supports the notion of "blue pages", to record user defined properties associated with a service - and to enable discovery of services based on these. UDDIe enables a registry to be more dynamic, by allowing services to hold a lease - a time period describing how long a service description should remain in the registry. UDDIe can co-exist with existing UDDI - and has been implemented as open-source software.